That time we cut paid social from the marketing mix
Story time!
Winter in Europe brings cold, wet, and dark days. At Delivery Hero, rider retention would drop, and acquiring new riders became challenging.
Local logistics teams managed recruitment campaigns with little marketing knowledge. Their solution? Increase Paid Social spend to attract leads. They would increase visibility and lead volumes went up.
Despite a low CPL, the conversion to Hired was less than 2%, resulting in a very high Cost per Hire. The logistics teams didn’t realise they were running awareness campaigns for a well-known job role and big delivery brand. The partial information from the ads resulted in big dropouts during the activation process when salary and working hours got clarified.
My team set up a cost tracking report for the full funnel and performed paid social blackout tests that showed decrease in lead volume, but no impact on hiring volumes. This led to a compelling case to discontinue most of the paid social campaigns. Despite this, some markets would still spend up to 100k EUR per month on agencies and ineffective campaigns just to appease management and ‘do everything they can’ to solve the acquisition issue.
Every year I remember this project when I see similar campaigns show up again around Oct/Nov.
Key takeaways:
Define the right KPI to measure success
Measure your full funnel
Push your management when the data tells a strong story
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